A Star Chef From Asia Lands in New York

Eden will be a simple and elegant restaurant from the chef David Laris.

Danny Ghitis for The New York Times

By FLORENCE FABRICANT

August 25, 2017

After cooking professionally for 31 years, David Laris, who was born in Sydney, Australia, and made a name as a versatile chef and restaurateur in Hong Kong, Shanghai and London, has arrived in Manhattan. “To get a foot in New York is really important,” this voluble, peripatetic chef said.

In October, he will open Eden, an 80-seat restaurant he describes as simple and elegant, in the Cachet Boutique NYC hotel on West 42nd Street. There will be no tablecloths, no open kitchen — just a big bar in the center of the room and an à la carte menu that balances creative vegetable dishes and local meats, fish and poultry. “It will be a small menu, with 20 or dishes that will change often,” he said.

A dish like roasted Green Circle chicken breast with charred broccoli, fingerlings, Castelvetrano gremolata and Anita’s coconut yogurt is typical. (The yogurt is from Brooklyn.) Mr. Laris doesn’t like labels, but he frequently deploys the terms “farm-to-table” and “wellness.” On that score, he is insisting that his chef de cuisine, who will run the kitchen day-to-day, go shopping in farmers’ markets at least three times a week.

He started at age 16 in a French kitchen in Australia with a chef who, he said, treated him like an “indentured servant.” He went on to work in Macao, Hong Kong and Vietnam, with a stint in culinary school on the way. Sir Terence Conran recruited him for Mezzo in London. Then Mr. Laris was back in Asia, in Shanghai at Laris at Three on the Bund, in the waterfront complex where Jean-Georges Vongerichten also has a restaurant.

His food was pan-Asian. “In Australia, we don’t have boundaries, and you can cleverly reinvent local ingredients,” he said. He did consulting, and developed restaurants in hotels in Beijing; Bangkok; Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and elsewhere.

Last year, after discovering that his joy in creating and tasting food had disappeared, he became a vegan, eliminated processed foods and alcohol from his diet and turned to meditation to “reset” his palate and mind. “After five months, my love for the ingredients was reborn,” he said.

His second restaurant in the hotel, Bellbrook, to open next spring, will be more formal and more Asian-inspired. Mr. Laris is also consulting on the food for the new Playboy Club, to open later this year in the same building.